Presentation
MDD19 - Integrating Human Factors Practitioners into Multidisciplinary Design Teams
DescriptionThe purpose of this presentation is to advocate for integrating Human Factors practitioners directly into design teams, not on an as-needed basis, and discusses the benefits during different phases of the design process.
Early-stage user testing often includes many objectives – to determine a device’s features and functionality, to understand how emerging designs might affect workflows (hopefully positively), to get an early indication of how the design might mitigate use errors, and to generally ensure the design team is headed in the right direction. At Delve, which is a product development consultancy, we espouse integrating Human Factors practitioners into the design team for many reasons. Often, Human Factors is engaged to design, conduct, and report on a user study but, if that is the operating principle by which a design team utilizes HF, it is inefficient and could put the overall project cost and timeline at risk, regardless of the stage of development.
Integrating HF should begin with contextual inquiry. The foundational empathy and knowledge gained by the HF practitioner at this stage allows them to represent the end user through the entire design process. The findings from contextual inquiry can define testable and traceable User Needs and sets the design team on the right path. This maximizes the chances the emerging concepts meet the needs of the end users and fit into the users’ desired workflow, while ideally minimizing potential critical use errors via mitigation by design.
As the concepts mature, having an integrated HF practitioner also allows them to determine when the design team should pivot from being internally-focused and shift to soliciting feedback from end users. In our experience, design teams without integrated HF often have one or both of the following failure modes: 1) They run formative studies unnecessarily or with concepts that could have been already eliminated by a Human Factors practitioner who was involved in contextual inquiry and therefore would have been able to represent the end user’s point of view. 2) Conversely, design teams wait too long to run a Formative Study and end up progressing too far down a design path, only having to backtrack significantly when end user feedback tells them they are on the wrong track or usability problems become obvious once a real user interacts with a design.
Regardless of what stage of design a product is in, creating the appropriate stimuli for a given study is another strong argument for integrated HF. The physical and/or digital stimuli that are used in the study can be appropriately limited to whatever features or functionality are of interest. At Delve, it is common to see clients create overly complicated or unrealistic stimuli which leads to challenges in the overall design process. Sometimes, these issues compound themselves. For example, imagine a new medical device with both physical and digital interfaces. If the design team waits until an Alpha prototype to test interfaces for the first time because “that’s the first time the various device interfaces will work in a holistic manner” is very likely putting the overall project at risk. Cleverly designed User Experience (UX) models, possibly incorporating non-functional buttons and an embedded digital prototype, could have been cheaply and quickly created much earlier in the design process. HF practitioners at Delve work hand-in-hand with Industrial Designers, Mechanical Engineers, Interaction Designers, and the Prototype Shop to create these UX models for Formative Studies. Creating cheap and effective UX models reduces project risk overall by testing interactions and feature sets well before all those features interact with each other in a holistic manner, thereby either validating the current design direction or redirecting it earlier in the project timeline, saving time and money.
Later in the design process, while a product is being engineered and Alpha or Beta prototypes are available, integrated HF team members focus more on testing critical tasks that possibly could not be adequately tested earlier. Corner case alarms or a refined cassette loading mechanism are two examples. Even at a later stage of the product development process, the earlier a usability problem can be identified, it decreases the overall cost and timeline to fix.
Although integrating Human Factors practitioners into the design team may, on paper, increase the cost of a design project, doing so has numerous advantages. HF: 1) Ensures end users’ needs are represented, 2) Helps minimize the number of user studies required and the proper stimuli are present for those studies, 3) Tracks and minimizes the number of Critical Use Errors, 4) Minimizes overall project risk and cost.
Early-stage user testing often includes many objectives – to determine a device’s features and functionality, to understand how emerging designs might affect workflows (hopefully positively), to get an early indication of how the design might mitigate use errors, and to generally ensure the design team is headed in the right direction. At Delve, which is a product development consultancy, we espouse integrating Human Factors practitioners into the design team for many reasons. Often, Human Factors is engaged to design, conduct, and report on a user study but, if that is the operating principle by which a design team utilizes HF, it is inefficient and could put the overall project cost and timeline at risk, regardless of the stage of development.
Integrating HF should begin with contextual inquiry. The foundational empathy and knowledge gained by the HF practitioner at this stage allows them to represent the end user through the entire design process. The findings from contextual inquiry can define testable and traceable User Needs and sets the design team on the right path. This maximizes the chances the emerging concepts meet the needs of the end users and fit into the users’ desired workflow, while ideally minimizing potential critical use errors via mitigation by design.
As the concepts mature, having an integrated HF practitioner also allows them to determine when the design team should pivot from being internally-focused and shift to soliciting feedback from end users. In our experience, design teams without integrated HF often have one or both of the following failure modes: 1) They run formative studies unnecessarily or with concepts that could have been already eliminated by a Human Factors practitioner who was involved in contextual inquiry and therefore would have been able to represent the end user’s point of view. 2) Conversely, design teams wait too long to run a Formative Study and end up progressing too far down a design path, only having to backtrack significantly when end user feedback tells them they are on the wrong track or usability problems become obvious once a real user interacts with a design.
Regardless of what stage of design a product is in, creating the appropriate stimuli for a given study is another strong argument for integrated HF. The physical and/or digital stimuli that are used in the study can be appropriately limited to whatever features or functionality are of interest. At Delve, it is common to see clients create overly complicated or unrealistic stimuli which leads to challenges in the overall design process. Sometimes, these issues compound themselves. For example, imagine a new medical device with both physical and digital interfaces. If the design team waits until an Alpha prototype to test interfaces for the first time because “that’s the first time the various device interfaces will work in a holistic manner” is very likely putting the overall project at risk. Cleverly designed User Experience (UX) models, possibly incorporating non-functional buttons and an embedded digital prototype, could have been cheaply and quickly created much earlier in the design process. HF practitioners at Delve work hand-in-hand with Industrial Designers, Mechanical Engineers, Interaction Designers, and the Prototype Shop to create these UX models for Formative Studies. Creating cheap and effective UX models reduces project risk overall by testing interactions and feature sets well before all those features interact with each other in a holistic manner, thereby either validating the current design direction or redirecting it earlier in the project timeline, saving time and money.
Later in the design process, while a product is being engineered and Alpha or Beta prototypes are available, integrated HF team members focus more on testing critical tasks that possibly could not be adequately tested earlier. Corner case alarms or a refined cassette loading mechanism are two examples. Even at a later stage of the product development process, the earlier a usability problem can be identified, it decreases the overall cost and timeline to fix.
Although integrating Human Factors practitioners into the design team may, on paper, increase the cost of a design project, doing so has numerous advantages. HF: 1) Ensures end users’ needs are represented, 2) Helps minimize the number of user studies required and the proper stimuli are present for those studies, 3) Tracks and minimizes the number of Critical Use Errors, 4) Minimizes overall project risk and cost.
Event Type
Poster Presentation
TimeTuesday, March 264:45pm - 6:15pm CDT
LocationSalon C
Digital Health
Simulation and Education
Hospital Environments
Medical and Drug Delivery Devices
Patient Safety Research and Initiatives